Linked List: March 20, 2014

Thursday, 20 March 2014

Google Announces ‘Android Wear’ 

I’ve been thinking about this for days, and I just can’t get past the fact that they don’t explain how these watches have always-on color displays and reasonable battery life. Maybe I’m too skeptical, or too biased against Google and this sort of “we’ll do the OS, a bunch of OEMs will make various devices” model — but I just don’t believe this is anywhere near ready to ship as a practical product.

I’m reminded of this.

Update: Apparently the watch display is not always on. It goes off, and uses motion/gyro sensors to turn on when you move your wrist (and, I presume, turns on when you receive a new notification). We shall see how well that works. Even so I remain skeptical regarding battery life.

Google Under Fire for Data-Mining Student Email Messages 

Benjamin Herold, reporting for Education Week:

As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools.

In the suit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising.

Shocker.

How Microsoft Tracked Down Trade Secret Leaking Employee 

Ed Bott:

Four days later, on September 7, 2012, the FBI says Microsoft acted:

The source indicated that the blogger contacted the source using a Microsoft Hotmail e-mail address that TWCI had previously connected to the blogger. After confirmation that the data was Microsoft’s proprietary trade secret, on September 7, 2012 Microsoft’s Office of Legal Compliance (OLC) approved content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account. [emphasis added]

Those email messages in turn led to instant messaging conversations and links to files shared on SkyDrive. Every piece of data was stored on Microsoft servers using an account allegedly linked to Kibkalo.

Microsoft is taking a serious PR hit on the privacy implications of this. They’ve been telling us for years that they don’t read our email (unlike Google), but now it turns out they do, if they think we’re using it to leak Windows source code.

They nailed a guy who was flat-out stealing from them. I’m not even saying they were wrong to do it — I’m simply questioning whether it was worth it.

Some Classic Claim Chowdhry 

So much to choose from, but here’s a good one from 2009:

Investors should not think the upcoming version of iPhone 3 is going to be as successful as iPhone 2.0 because it will have solid competition from Palm Pre, developed by ex-Apple designer Jon Rubinstein.

Palm Pre has a superior operating system than iPhone. It runs on a better network — Sprint CDMA — versus iPhone which runs on GSM.

60 Days 

Cadie Thompson, writing for CNBC, “Time Is Ticking for Apple to Announce an iWatch, Say Analysts”

Apple needs an iWatch sooner rather than later, or the company will risk losing its innovative edge to rivals, analysts say.

“They only have 60 days left to either come up with something or they will disappear,” said Trip Chowdhry, managing director at Global Equities Research. “It will take years for Apple’s $130 billion in cash to vanish, but it will become an irrelevant company … it will become a zombie, if they don’t come up with an iWatch.”

I’m guessing the ellipsis denotes when he paused for another line of coke.